Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca

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It is the easiest thing in the world to break children — and Georgie was dealt incalculable damage by her adoptive mother and father. Her insistence on perfection went so far as to force Georgie through an unwanted rhinoplasty before she’d reached adulthood. Ferdinand Mount tells this extraordinary story with its serial twists and surprises in polished, lucid prose with wit and sympathy. One sure way of ending your relationship with Georgie was to express pity towards her or to let slip, even subtly or unintentionally, that you felt sorry for her.

I don't feel like redoing the review, but just let me say that this is a fascinating and very unusual book. First, that when people came to think about it, there are quite a few disconnections in their own families – things that were skated over or not quite understood.

As Ferdinand Mount’s publisher happily notes, his latest novel, Making Nice , is what you might get if you crossed a little light Evelyn Waugh with Armando Iannucci’s TV satire The Thick of It . The woman formally known as Eileen Constance Sylvia McDuff, or Patricia Elizabeth Baring, or Mrs G R Mount – whose age could only be guessed at – is thoroughly modern. Its singular topography stirs him; he grasps that, more than most cities, it is a collection of villages; he has such feeling for its hulking chapels, crumbling steel mills and working poor. Arriving in 1941, Georgie was Betty and Grieg’s golden girl and their only child until, sometime in 1950, “an adopted baby sister suddenly arrives, out of the blue, like a food parcel during the war. The song, written by Eddie Miller and Jimmy Campbell, explores the delicate nuances of love and showcases Arnold’s emotive vocals.

My parents, Meg and Hugh, were at the wedding and later introduced Georgie and Claude to another couple, the artist, Andre de Moller and his wife, June. It had been chosen for them by Munca, who brooked no disagreements and did not invite collaboration in the decision-making. She was married to Mount's uncle, his father's brother, for over 20 years, but Munca (a portentous sign that she abandoned all names except that of Beatrix Potter's Bad Mouse!Mount explains of his decade-long exhumation of a past riddled with as many deceptions and double-crosses as any espionage novel.

He has a difficult job as Munca didn't seem to tell the truth about herself so every single detail is hard won. Their will was the one way in which the Mounts might have said ‘sorry’ to Georgie, but — astoundingly — they appear not to have felt that they had anything for which to say sorry. I’d sent her an electronic cigarette — not in a prim, finger-wagging way, but because vaping was my latest passion and I thought it was worth her giving it a try — she must have been smoking over a pack a day of 20 real ones by then. of late John Anthony Baring of New York”, which is curious because she has no trace of an American accent and never once mentions her illustrious father.The twists and turns of this family story are so outlandish that it’s almost impossible to believe that this is a true story - although one that is so obscured by multiple layers of lies and subterfuge that it takes many months to unravel. Mount, now 82, ran the policy unit in the early 1980s, and thus played a major role in the creation of the Conservative party’s 1983 election manifesto. While Georgie’s adoption was the first of the Mounts’ deceptions to surface, it was merely one of an intergenerational network of falsehoods spun by Munca and then given succour by Greig. For those who had the good sense not to attend law school, the best parts of meeting together with fellow attorneys under the pretext of continuing legal education is swapping client stories (which do not involve any identifying details, just character types that real attorneys encounter during their practice lives) during lunches and dinners associated with those educational affairs.

Mount, as do other, seemingly related conundrums of Betty’s life: her ruthless sabotaging of Georgie’s marriage plans, the serial romances of her past, her hazy connection to her jaunty brother Buster, her real age—her real name(s), for heaven’s sake. Once journalists get their hands on them,those curt, day-to-day messages can be just a tad embarrassing — as this week’s expletive-laden evidence to the UK Covid Inquiry confirms. Mainly, though, she found a home in the voluntary sector — her confidence and self-belief had been too wounded to thrive in a hierarchical setting, working for bosses who would almost certainly have been less intelligent than her.Mount's writing style is reportage turned up a notch - simple facts clothed in delightful and witty phrasing. This process of making a request to the trust was so arduous and frightening for Georgie, it may have hastened her death. made sure that her previous lives were unknown to the wealthy family she finally fortuitously (for her) married into. In the final three years of her life, her inclination to have guests diminished and she moved our relationship to the telephone and computer.